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An Emerging Threat Fileless Malware: a Survey and Research Challenges Sudhakar1,2* and Sushil Kumar3

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An Emerging Threat Fileless Malware: a Survey and Research Challenges Sudhakar1,2* and Sushil Kumar3 Sudhakar and Kumar Cybersecurity (2020) 3:1 Cybersecurity https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-019-0043-x SURVEY Open Access An emerging threat Fileless malware: a survey and research challenges Sudhakar1,2* and Sushil Kumar3 Abstract With the evolution of cybersecurity countermeasures, the threat landscape has also evolved, especially in malware from traditional file-based malware to sophisticated and multifarious fileless malware. Fileless malware does not use traditional executables to carry-out its activities. So, it does not use the file system, thereby evading signature-based detection system. The fileless malware attack is catastrophic for any enterprise because of its persistence, and power to evade any anti-virus solutions. The malware leverages the power of operating systems, trusted tools to accomplish its malicious intent. To analyze such malware, security professionals use forensic tools to trace the attacker, whereas the attacker might use anti-forensics tools to erase their traces. This survey makes a comprehensive analysis of fileless malware and their detection techniques that are available in the literature. We present a process model to handle fileless malware attacks in the incident response process. In the end, the specific research gaps present in the proposed process model are identified, and associated challenges are highlighted. Keywords: Fileless malware, Botnet, Incident response, Memory forensics, Incident investigation, Memory resident malware, Rootkit Introduction Tian et al., 2019a). The attacker has been using malware Throughout the history of the malicious programs, there for its capabilities to control the compromised systems lo- is one thing which had remained unchanged, the devel- cally or remotely. Although, the operating systems itself opment of the malware program. Someone had to providing several capabilities to the attacker. develop the code in such a manner so that no existing The attackers are mostly involved in exploring vulner- anti-virus (AV) software can detect its presence in the abilities in the legitimate software that are already installed system. In 2002, the development of the malware indus- in the machine such as flash player, web-browser, PDF try had changed the entire threat landscape. This viewer and Microsoft office to exploit and load a script malware has the capability of residing in the system’s directly into the main memory without even touching the main memory undetected making least changes in the local file systems (Pontiroli & Martinez, 2015;Ranietal., file system. This strategy has become the non-malware 2019). In Windows Operating Systems, two most powerful or fileless malware (Patten, 2017; Kumar et al., 2019a). tools and. NET framework are already installed which at- When a system is detected as the compromised by tacker can use to exploit the vulnerability, one is WMI some malicious program or malware, the very first thing (Windows Management Instrumentation) (Graeber, 2015) a forensic expert will work to look for some malicious and second is PowerShell. WMI came into the limelight of programs or software that should not be there. However, the cybersecurity community when it was discovered that in this case, there is none because the fileless malware it is used maliciously as a component in the suite of ex- does not reside in the file system, it is a running ploits by Stuxnet (Falliere et al., 2011; Farwell & Roho- program in the memory (Mansfield-Devine, 2017; zinski, 2011). Since then, WMI has been gaining popularity amongst the attackers, because it can perform * Correspondence: [email protected] system reconnaissance, AV/VM (Virtual Machine) detec- 1 School of Computer & Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, tion, code execution, lateral movement, persistence, and 110067, New Delhi, India 2Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, Ministry of Electronics & data theft. Similarly, in the case of PowerShell, it is a Information Technology, 110003, New Delhi, India highly flexible system shell and scripting platform for the Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Sudhakar and Kumar Cybersecurity (2020) 3:1 Page 2 of 12 attacker to provide all the features in the different stages patterns in the process, registry, minor changes in of an intrusion. Since, it can also be used to bypass anti- file systems, and event logs. virus detection, maintain persistence or infiltrate data. For We proposed a novel investigative model of incident example: In 2016, a hacker group infiltrates into the DNC handling and response, especially in fileless malware. (Democratic National Committee) with fileless malware. The model includes all the phases with memory In this incident, the PowerShell and WMI were used as forensic, analysis and investigation of such incidents. the attack vectors (Report, 2016). In recent time, malware developers have adopted the The rest of the paper is organized as shown in Table 1. high-level language in the development of the malicious codes that have changed the malware industry. After the re- Background of Fileless malware lease of Microsoft .Net framework, it became the center of Unlike traditional file-based malware attacks, instead of attraction for all the windows software developers and un- using real malicious executables, it leverages trusted, intentionally revolutionizedthemalwareindustry(Tian legitimate processes i.e. LOLBins (Living off the Land et al., 2019b;Tianetal.,2019c). It gives the malware writers Binaries) (Living Off The Land Binaries And Scripts - a new and powerful arsenal equipped with all the features (LOLBins and LOLScripts), 2019) and built-in tools of to make a malware undetected and stay ahead of the anti- operating systems to attack and hide. The detailed virus software. With the use of this framework, malware comparisons between traditional file-based malware and creator may easily interact with the operating system and fileless malware are mentioned in the Table 2 (Afianian exploit vulnerabilities with the entire catalog of products et al., 2018). In this section, the formal definition of the with the help of the framework (Patten, 2017;Pontiroli& fileless malware and execution techniques along with the Martinez, 2015; Tian et al., 2019d;Bhasinetal.,2018). The system tools, is discussed. The section also elaborates on attacker uses a tool like PowerShell to coordinate attacks the infection technique used by such malware with with the help of existing toolkits such as meterpreter attack vectors, as shown in Fig. 1. (About the Metasploit Meterpreter, 2019), SET (Social En- gineering Toolkit) (Pavković &Perkov,n.d.), or the Metas- Definition ploit Framework including an extensive list of modules that Fileless malware attacks do not download malicious files are already built-in and ready to use for the purpose of or write any content to the disk in order to compromise plotting additional attacks (Tian et al., 2018). the systems. The attacker exploits merely the vulnerable The fileless malware attacks in the organizations or application to inject malicious code directly into the targeted individuals are trending to compromise a tar- main memory. The attacker can also leverage the trusted geted system avoids downloading malicious executable and widely used applications, i.e., Microsoft office or ad- files usually to disk; instead, it uses the capability of ministration tools native to Windows OS like PowerShell web-exploits, macros, scripts, or trusted admin tools and WMI to run scripts and load malicious code directly (Tan et al., 2018; Mansfield-Devine, 2018). Fileless mal- into volatile memory (Stop Fileless Attacksat Pre- ware can plot any attacks to the systems undetected like execution, 2017; Zhang, 2018). The procedures and at- reconnaissance, execution, persistence, or data theft. tack vectors are mentioned in Fig. 1. There are not any limitations on what type of attacks can be possible with fileless malware. This survey in- Execution of fileless malware cludes infection mechanisms, legitimate system tools The malware authors have leveraged the advantage of used in the process, analysis of major fileless malware, two powerful legitimate windows applications Windows research challenges while handling such incidents in the Management Instrumentation and PowerShell to exe- process of incident and response. This type of study was cute their malicious binaries to make the attack un- not done in the literature, which includes the different detected by AV solutions (Graeber, 2015). perspectives of fileless malware. The main contributions The life cycle of the fileless malware works in three of the paper are mentioned below. phases. First, attack vector, which has methods through which the attacker targets their victims. Second, the The background of the malware with evasion and execution mechanism in this the initial malicious code propagation techniques used to identify targets and could try to create a registry entry for its persistence or stay undetected in the victim machines. WMI object with VBScript/JScript to invoke an instance We analyze the behavior
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